Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 133

How many women in a typical Maine bar are transgendered Marine deserters?

Doesn't
really matter -- they can still beat you up. Pvt. Tremblay went over the hill in 1981.

How the All-Volunteer Force undermined accountability in the modern U.S. military

By Capt. Kyle Packard, U.S. Army

Best Defense department of AVF issues

The adoption of the All-Volunteer Force
(AVF) was a subjective reaction to public opposition to the Vietnam War that
has inadvertently stripped away accountability at all levels of the
civil-military relationship. Although it is widely viewed as a success both
inside and outside the defense establishment, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
have exposed its limits. Tactically, the AVF has no peer, however, the last 11
years of war has brought to light several unforeseen strategic consequences
that have created an unsustainable relationship between soldier and state.

When framing the problems that have
come to define the last decade of conflict, whether it be an archaic personnel
system or dishonest civil-military discourse, a lack of accountability is the
common thread. When compounded with a reluctance to repeat the emotional
isolation of returning Vietnam War veterans, society's disassociation with
military service creates an environment where dissension is perceived as
socially taboo. If the majority of America's sons and daughters served, then
the development of a coherent wartime national defense strategy with a viable
endgame would be mandatory, thus creating a culture of accountability. Public
officials would be held responsible for both their successes and failures
through either the ballot box or via civil unrest.

If there is no shared sacrifice, then
there is no obligation to maintain accountability. An exclusively professional
military has produced an undeniable divide between those that bear the burden
of America from those that benefit from its liberties. Without a nation
mobilized, absent from the fight was the influx of ingenuity deemed essential
to combat ambiguous insurgent networks. Without a shared economic burden, we
have soaring national debt with the potential for a balanced budget continually
being shifted to the right.

The
wealth and prosperity of post-World War II America has fundamentally changed
the social contract between citizen and state; the government ensures the
wellbeing of a large segment of society yet requires little in return. To
rebalance the inequity, all citizens, or those who desire to become citizens,
must serve a term of military or civil service. Mr. Ricks, in his New York Times op-ed,
provides a salient solution which should serve to spark a national dialogue. I
would add that the War Powers Resolution would need to be revised to require
Congress to approve, in conjunction with a declaration of war, a shift towards
the armed forces to meet wartime manpower demands.

The
American viewpoint of compulsory military service as a government-imposed
burden has not evolved with the current role of the state. While the
technological and special operation requirements of a 21st century
military power requires a small standing force, the sacrifices of war, both
materially and psychologically, must be universally shared across society. Without
unity of effort, America risks inadvertently creating a military caste that
sees itself as superior to the citizens its intent is to serve.

Although
today's military has not experienced the postwar pendulum swing of the Vietnam
era, a lack of accountability may still hollow the force.

CPT Kyle D. Packard is an U.S. Army infantry officer
assigned to Fort Campbell, KY. He has deployed four times to Iraq and
Afghanistan with both conventional and special operations units. He plans to
attend graduate school in the fall of 2013 .

Corruption in Afghanistan: An introduction to one fine mess

By Gary Anderson

Best Defense office of foreign ethics

In 2004-5, I did a study on the
future of the Taliban for Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who was then the
commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. After the 2001 U.S.-led
intervention, the Taliban had appeared on the run, but three years later, they
were making a comeback. What I found in the study was that the Karzai
government was the chief enabler of the resurgent Taliban movement. Afghan
governmental corruption and incompetence was making the Taliban look good in
comparison, despite years of misrule when that organization was in power. As a
commander, and later as the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Eikenberry angered Afghan
President Karzai by urging reform, and ultimately failed in his attempts to get
Karzai to clean up his government in a meaningful way. Today, the Taliban are
back in spades. This has damaged every aspect of the U.S. war effort because it
affects security, governance, rule of law, and development. These are the
pillars of coalition strategy in that unhappy country.

Corruption is exacerbated by the
highly centralized Afghan form of government. All provincial (state) and
district (county) officials are appointed by the central government in Kabul.
On paper, there is nothing wrong with centralization. Many highly-developed
democracies such as Japan have basically the same system. It even semi-works in
Iraq. Those countries have good transportation and reliable communication
systems. This allows the central government to control things that go on in
governance in the provinces. None of that is true in Afghanistan. Consequently,
it is nearly impossible for the Kabul government to closely monitor the
performance of governance and development in the provinces, much less remove
incompetent or corrupt officials.

The most pernicious corruption in
our province was caused by the provincial commander of the Afghanistan National
Police, the provincial prosecutor, and the director of public health. The head
cop was a competent administrator, and kept the provincial capital relatively
secure; however, he did so by hoarding personnel and resources badly needed by
the outlying districts that he was supposed to be supervising. Outside the
provincial capital, he was making a handy side-living running a protection
racket for drug dealers and smugglers. Some of his handpicked appointees in my
district were running extortion and burglary rings.

The prosecutor was making his money
by encouraging defense lawyers from all over Afghanistan to send their wealthy
clients to our province where he could guarantee light sentences or mere fines
for serious offenses. The director of public health for the province, one Dr.
Tariq, is a real piece of work. Over three years, he managed to misspend or
divert $9 million dollars of World Bank funding, the vast majority of which was
U.S.-provided.

While working at the district
level, I had success in purging the worst of the bad cops in mid-level
leadership positions by threatening to invite Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post to report on police
corruption. This did cause the chief to replace to purge eight of them. It was
a small start, but a start.

Once I got to the provincial
capital as the governance advisor for the entire province, we caught a few
breaks; they were caused, not by blatant corruption, but by gender issues. What
finally did in the police chief was his reported rape of three female officers
who had the gall to file complaints. Although they were eventually forced to
retract their charges, a national uproar ensued, and the Afghan national
government was embarrassed enough to reassign the top cop. However, to the best
of my knowledge, he has not been held accountable for the rest of the
corruption he fostered.

The prosecutor became a target
because there was national level focus on the fact that many of his client
protection scams were related to so-called "honor killings." In these crimes,
husbands or other relatives kill a woman or girl for embarrassing the family by
such heinous crimes as demanding a divorce or working outside of the house. The
scrutiny was encouraged by us, and allowed our local national security
directorate commander to organize a sting operation that finally jailed him.
However, before he could go to trial, the former prosecutor used his
connections to get permission to travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual Haj
religious pilgrimage. To the best of my knowledge, he is still on the loose.

Despite our compiling a package on
Dr. Tariq and sending it to Kabul, he is still on the job. One of the most
appalling charges is that at least 11 women died in childbirth for lack of
midwives that World Bank funding had provided for the hiring of such medical
personnel in the last year alone.

Almost everyone in the province
knew that all three of these characters were bad actors, but no one could do
anything about it because they were hired and paid by Kabul. It took outside
action by foreigners and the public glare of the media to do what little that
we could. Until the Afghan government allows some form of local public review
of provincial and district officials, the government of Afghanistan will be its
own worst enemy.

Gary Anderson, a retired Marine Corps colonel, was a district
governance advisor in Afghanistan's Badghis Province. With transition of the
district to Afghan security control, he became the provincial governance and
rule of law advisor.

It's time to cut off aid to both Palestine and Israel and act in our own interests

By Major Chris
Heatherly

Best Defense guest
columnist

"...and she loved a boy very, very much -- even more than she
loved herself." -- Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree

Many Americans read The
Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein while growing up. Summarized, the story is
about the relationship between a young boy and a tree whose self-sacrifice to
please the boy is a recurrent theme. By book's end, the tree is reduced to
little more than a lonely stump with nothing left to give. Although The
Giving Tree is nearly 50 years old, the book's warning on the dangers of
self-sacrifice are particularly apt when describing the current state of U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian
relations. If the United States does not address the manner and tone of this
relationship to determine our irreducible interests, it risks sacrificing
international influence and our own national priorities.

Fact: The United
States provided nearly $3.1 billion to Israel in 2012.

Fact: The United
States has provided $115 billion to Israel since its foundation in 1949.

Fact: The United
States has provided over $4 billion to the Palestinians since they began
limited self-governance in the 1990s.

Question: What, if
anything, has this goodwill bought the United States and how have our own
interests been furthered?

Israeli forces
attacked the USS Liberty in
1967, killing 34 and wounding 171 U.S. sailors. Israel has conducted numerous
espionage operations against the United States, gravely damaging U.S. national
security. Amongst the known spying incidents, the case of Jonathan Pollard is
particularly egregious. A U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, Pollard passed tens
of thousands of highly classified documents to Israel before his capture in
1985. Pollard received a life sentence for espionage in 1987. Former Secretary
of Defense Caspar Weinberger considered Pollard's actions so damaging that "It
is difficult for me, even in the so-called ‘year of the spy,' to conceive of a
greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in the view
of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity
of the information he sold to Israel." Since his conviction, Israel's
government admitted to running Pollard as an agent, granted him Israeli citizenship,
and has continually lobbied for his release.

Palestinian behavior
towards the United States is no better. The Palestinian Liberation Front
hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, killing U.S. passenger
Leon Klinghoffer. On 9/11, CNN and other media sources showed video of
Palestinians dancing in the streets in celebration of al Qaeda's terrorist
attacks. Hamas, a U.S. and European Union designated terrorist organization,
enjoys widespread political support from the Palestinian people and election to
parliamentary seats.

American government
support for Israel goes far beyond simple financial donations. The United
States has employed its veto authority to block United Nations Security Council
resolutions against Israel over 40 times. (By comparison, China has used the
veto authority just 8 times while Russia/Soviet Union together tallied 13.) In
most of these instances, the United States has cast the sole vote of
opposition. Additionally, the United States has deployed military assets and
personnel to protect Israel against its neighbors. Such one-sided support has
not gone unnoticed, especially in the Arab world. It generates widespread
suspicion of American motives, interests, and actions in the Middle East and
the greater Muslim street -- a trend that has occurred for decades.

Neither Israel nor
the Palestinians appear to be truly interested in a lasting, peaceful solution
to their decades-long struggle for territorial control. Israeli "settlers"
build illegal settlements in Palestinian areas in violation of U.N. resolutions.
Hamas fires rockets from schools, mosques, and other protected locations
against civilian targets. Israel conducts drone and air strikes in retaliation.
A Palestinian suicide bomber kills numerous Israeli citizens...and Israel's
military forces destroy the bomber's family home with resultant collateral
damage. Both sides clamor to play the victim on the world stage. It's a modern
day version of the Hatfield and McCoy feud with religious extremism added to
the equation.

In my opinion, there
is no compelling or logical reason for the United States to retain the status
quo relationship with either Israel or the Palestinians. Some may see this view
as either anti-Semitic or Islamaphobic. In reality, it is neither. I am an
alumnus of a Jewish national collegiate fraternity and proud to have several
Jewish and Muslim friends. I believe, however, that America should withhold all
foreign aid to both parties, reframe the situation in the Middle East, and
develop a fresh, balanced approach to Israelis and Palestinians alike. First
and foremost, this approach should be built to achieve American national
interests, be they a peaceful Middle East, greater global influence, continued
access to oil resources, a non-nuclear Iran, or the spread of democracy. My
recommendation aspires to follow President George Washington's cautious advice
on foreign entanglements. It is time to stop being the proverbial giving tree,
and instead to begin acting in our own national interests.

The opinions expressed in this article
are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of the United States
Government, the Department of Defense, or the United States Army. Major
Heatherly enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1994 and earned his commission via
Officer Candidate School in 1997. He has held a variety of assignments in
special operations, Special Forces, armored, and cavalry units. His operational
experience includes deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, South Korea, Kuwait,
Mali, and Nigeria. He holds master's degrees from the University of Oklahoma
and the School of Advanced Military Studies.

A 2nd Cav officer: Yes, our failures were real, but they reflected larger problems in the Army -- and we are learning from them

By Capt. Alexander Frank, U.S. Army

Best Defense guest respondent

Thomas
Ricks' recent post in Foreign Policy discussing a report on my
unit's performance during a major training exercise in Germany presents a
scathing critique. From my personal experience and through discussions with my
peers throughout the regiment, the criticisms he offers are largely valid. However,
they are incomplete and utterly meaningless unless viewed in the broader
context of the Army's culture. The points he makes are merely symptoms of
underlying cultural problems within the Army rather than the specific failures
he enumerates.

Valid criticisms

In
his post, Ricks reviews the Center for Army Lessons
Learned reports
on our exercise in October. He calls the conclusions of the reports "hair
raising" and draws out several key points. The reports found "commanders and
command sergeant majors tethered to command posts, rarely visiting subordinate
units." Instead of face-to-face interactions, they stayed in their command
posts and issued a steady stream of fragmentary orders, "not feeling
comfortable to allow subordinates to operate broadly under their intent." In
sum, he paints a picture of commanders micro-managing from the safety of their
headquarters.

On
a personal level, this is consistent with what I saw and my own actions as a
leader during the DATE. As an executive officer for one of the best line
companies in the regiment, I discussed with my commander before the exercise
what my role should be -- mentoring the platoon leaders based on my two years
of experience as a PL, including combat. This would involve moving forward to
their positions to walk through their plans and provide on the spot guidance
during key moments of a firefight, but from there letting them operate broadly
within what we were trying to accomplish.

Despite
agreement from my commander and clear intent during the exercise, I was never
encouraged to move forward of our company command post and did not take the
initiative to do so, despite the opportunity. Leaders at all levels rarely did
so.

Overall,
leaders -- including myself -- were focused on the multitude of tasks
prescribed to them in the institutional framework in which we operate. For me,
that meant taking part in meetings over the radio with various support
personnel, filling out logistics reports, and then running errands in the rear
such as picking up graphics from our intelligence people.

The
Army bureaucracy and culture prizes information flow and reliance on assets and
technology, making personal leadership a secondary priority. For example, reports
--how to send them, what was the best format, and their content were the key
priority prior to the commencement of DATE during our preparations. This
over-emphasis on information flow and technology meant that during the actual
exercise, there was little attempt to actually gain good situational awareness
through battlefield circulations and terrain analysis.

Partial viewpoints on
the nature of warfare

These
are merely symptoms of broader cultural problems and assumptions about the
nature of war in the 21st century that were brilliantly outlined by
T.X. Hammes in The Sling and the Stone. Hammes argues that
during the 1990s and into the first years of the 20th century, DOD developed an
institutional mindset completely centered around technology. The planning and
vision papers put out "see increased technical capabilities of command and
control as the key factor shaping future war." The command and control systems
created would "exceed the capabilities of any opponent and will provide us with
a near-perfect understanding of the battlefield." The enemy becomes "a series
of inanimate targets to be serviced. He who services the most targets the
fastest wins."

This
viewpoint formed the basis for the Future Combat System (FCS) and drove our
training and mindset for much of 1990s. As a retired general told me who played
a key role in the initiation of FCS , "future combat system was hijacked by
people who thought you could completely lift the fog of war." Although FCS was
eventually scrapped, the ideas that underpin it still drive Army culture. "Currently,
DOD has defined the future as technology and is driving all experiments in that
direction."

A
perfect illustration of this a movie I was shown at my Infantry Officer
Training course. It starts with a rather chubby colonel in a perfectly starched
uniform striding into his command post, a comfortable tent with desks, chairs,
and several computers set up. A major informs him that a UAV has picked up an
enemy tank headed toward his lines. "Very well," he says, "put an artillery
target right there, and then fire it on my command." The commander pauses as he
watches the tank on a live feed slowly plodding along and then excitedly yells,
"Fire." The fire mission destroys the tank and everyone in the command tent
gives themselves a pat on the back for enabling their colonel to destroy a lone
tank. The movie focused on FBCB2 -- an excellent tool that allows great
situational awareness on the battlefield. The narrator introduced it claiming, "FBCB2
and integrated technologies will allow unprecedented
low-level initiative and delegation of authority." Not quite what happened in
the video, however, but a good illustration of Army culture and mindset.

The result

The
criticisms listed by Ricks of our unit flow from the cultural problems observed
by T.X. Hammes and others. Hammes discusses how these attitudes have made it
very difficult to effectively fight a complex global insurgency that tends not
to approach the battlefield straight on, in tanks. Even in a fight against a
more conventional enemy, the mindset Hammes describes proved ineffective,
leading to the weaknesses Ricks outlines. Because of the emphasis on
information flow and technology, it's natural for commanders to remain in their
command posts where they can have access to the flow of reports from the front
and UAV feeds from above. In theory, they can access a near-perfect view of the
battlefield and micro-manage their formations thanks to the excellent
communication and sensor technologies at their disposal. In such circumstances,
commanders moving forward behind their lead assault elements aren't necessary
to get a good idea of the battle or drive their subordinates to take action
quickly.

DATE
showed the fallacy of this mindset. The opposing forces we fought did not
afford us the opportunity when they attacked to form a near-perfect view of the
battle. Why? Because they moved so
quickly and concentrated their forces so well that by the time reports and UAV
feeds were processed, the information was already useless. This occurred
because commanders never moved forward to get a good idea of the terrain, and
so our enemy was able to utilize it effectively to bypass all of the obstacles
and areas we planned to kill them in. The result was that our enemy was deep in
our rear before we brought to bear any assets against them. We were unable to
develop coherent action in the face of attack and they managed to engage our
forces piecemeal one after the other. With their firepower and armor advantage,
they were able to beat us in any engagement.

A learning organization

That
being said, Ricks tells only one side of the story and ignores the accurate and
insightful comments he received from Colonel Barclay. The thrashing we took
when we were on the defense served its purpose well. During the next phase of
the operation, when we were on the attack, we embraced a far bolder plan with
commanders out of their command posts right behind their lead elements. My
squadron commander spent the bulk of his time just behind our lead elements
where he was able to better influence the fight.

The
plan developed by headquarters allowed for more subordinate initiative. One of
our platoon leaders noticed a key piece of terrain outside of his area and was
allowed to quickly seize it. From there he was able to flank the enemy and we
achieved complete tactical surprise. My troop was able to infiltrate deep into
the enemy's rear with no resistance and pick off isolated enemy units in front
of us. The enemy was never able to take concerted action against us and instead
continued to maneuver ineffectually in small isolated elements, similar to our
predicament when we were playing defense. A fellow captain's company came up on
the enemies reserve while they were essentially sitting in a parking lot and
destroyed them.

During
the culminating live fire exercise afterwards, my company commander dismounted
from his Stryker and got behind the lead platoons rather than managing the
fight over the radio and FBCB2, as he had been instructed to in the preliminary
briefing. When I saw him afterwards, he was giddy with excitement. "I felt
connected with the men," he said. He was actually in a position to influence
the battle. Although he might not have been as plugged in to the information
flow as well as he could have been further to the rear in his Stryker, he was
able to influence the human side of the operation. His mere presence inspired
the men, motivated the platoon leaders to take the initiative, and when
necessary, quickly make key decisions about individual platoons on the spot. Technology
has its place and provides tremendous advantages, but over-emphasis at the
expense of the human factor leads to failure in our experience.

Over
the past decade, the Army has had to become a learning organization, and my regiment
is no different. The important failures early on in the DATE stemming from
major cultural flaws I described have driven change. The entire point of
exercises such as DATE is to learn those lessons when lives are not at stake,
to lessen the chance they will occur on a real battlefield, a point Ricks does
not accept or acknowledge. [Interruption from Tom: Please don't forget the
second sentence of my original post: "It is worrisome that this unit
appears to have deteriorated so much, yet paradoxically reassuring that the
Army is using its maneuvers to identify shortcomings."]

Bottom
line: After participating in those mistakes,
I have the utmost confidence in the leaders in my regiment. The next
several years will be a key period for us and the Army as a whole as we relearn
how to fight a more combined arms hybrid threat than includes conventional mechanized
and armored formations. The mentality and culture we develop now will likely
determine the character of our institution for decades to come.

CPT Alexander Frank is
an infantry officer with 2nd Cavalry Regiment stationed in beautiful Vilseck,
Germany, where he is enjoying the travel opportunities while not training. He
has a bachelor's degree in physics from Duke University.

Eliot Cohen: Rotating commanders is wrong; also, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing you have one

When I was writing my most recent book,
one of the things that struck me is how rotating commanders
undercuts military effectiveness. So when reading a West Point oral history interview of Eliot Cohen, the Johns Hopkins strategist and historian, I was
pleased to see him hit the point solidly:

The rotation of commands, by the way, is -- this is kind
of a technical point -- but it's -- it is still insane that what we do is we
rotate divisional headquarters and corps headquarters to these places. And
that's just military malpractice. I mean it means you have no institutional
continuity whatsoever.

Tom again: Cohen makes an interesting
observation in the same interview:

...the
military obviously likes to say, "Don't
come to me with a problem. Come to me with a solution." I think that's sort
of bogus. I think first you've got to realize that you've got a problem, and
sometimes the solution to the problem may not be clear. But you're only going
to begin figuring it out once you acknowledge that you've got a problem.

Iraq war reenactors?

I find the concept darkly funny. I don't know why.
I guess it is because I never want to go near Iraq again.

What Hagel took away from the Army: His NCOs were better than his officers, and it's the 'little guys' who suffer

As defense secretary, Charles Hagel is
likely to be particularly attuned to the needs of enlisted soldiers and
skeptical of the demands of senior officers. That's my takeaway from reading
the transcript of an oral history interview he gave
to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Sure, he was in
Vietnam 45 years ago -- but he made these statements in 2002.

"The people in Washington make the
policy, but it's the little guys who come back in the body bags," he said near
the end of the interview.

He also came away from Vietnam underwhelmed
by his senior leaders. Here's an extended comment about that:

I was not much impressed with our -- our battalion
leaders, our XOs. I don't -- I didn't ever get a sense that they came down in,
enough into the platoon company level to really do what I thought officers
should do. And the lieutenants and the captains carried the bulk, as they do in
any war, essentially. But it was the sergeants. It was the senior enlisted that
carried the weight. I mean really carried the weight. And it was obvious to
everybody. And they -- the senior sergeants were the reassuring, calming guys.
And in many cases, many cases, these were the guys that didn't fall apart. And
some of the officers did. And some of the officers couldn't read maps very
well. And I just -- I never had much confidence in -- in a lot of the officer
corps. Now, there were exceptions to that. Some exceptional officers that I saw
and I served with.

It is also striking how the Army he
served in differs from today's. In 1968, Hagel had been in the Army less than
two years, yet for a short time after the Tet Offensive, he served as "acting
company sergeant." That's a green force.

Other stuff that struck me:

He saw the system of individual
rotation of soldiers causing a lot of problems.




He spent a lot of time walking point.




He saw PTSD in his own family. "I remember my father, when I was young -- he was in
World War II overseas for almost three years. I remember him waking up in the
middle of the night screaming....And it happens not just because of necessarily
the blood and gore that you see in combat. It's the -- it's the pressure of the
mental process that -- that makes you that way."




General Westmoreland's
brother-in-law, Lt. Col. Frederick Van Deusen, briefly was his battalion
commander before being killed. (In one three month period, he comments, "we had
three battalion commanders killed").




He
still has some shrapnel in his chest.

When the right starts talking about Pentagon bloat, big spending cuts loom

I
think comments like this one, from conservative
heartthrob Mark Steyn, foreshadow big cuts
in U.S. defense spending:

. . . The United States has the most
lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the Hindu
Kush, we're taking 12 years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer.

Something is wrong with this picture.
Indeed, something is badly wrong with the American way of war. And no one could
seriously argue that, in the latest in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll
call of America's unwon wars, the problem is a lack of money or resources.
Given its track record, why shouldn't the Pentagon get a top-to-toe overhaul -
or at least a cost-benefit analysis?

Just to be clear: I disagree with Hagel
on Israel, on Iran and on most everything else. But my colleagues on the right
are in denial if they don't think there are some very basic questions that need
to be asked about the too-big-to-fail Defense Department. Obama would like the
U.S. military to do less. Some of us would like it to do more with less -- more
nimbly, more artfully. But, if the national security establishment won't
acknowledge there's even a problem, they're unlikely to like the solutions
imposed by others.

Norm Friedman's new book on the naval weapons of World War I: Worth the price just for his handling of Jutland

By Jeff Williams

Best Defense office
of reviewing books about obscure weapons

Norm Friedman is a highly regarded naval writer
well known among those with an interest in naval warfare past and present. His
previous works such as U.S. Aircraft
Carriers and Naval Firepower are
the gold standard for an in-depth understanding of both naval aviation and
surface gunnery for the major powers in both the First and Second World Wars. The
most interesting feature of Friedman's new book, Naval Weapons of World War One: Guns,
Torpedoes, Mines and ASW Weapons of All Nations -- An Illustrated History,
is not the esoteric details of weapons themselves but rather how at that time
they were understood and employed.

The effort to appreciate and understand the
application of emerging naval technologies in the First World War is in many
ways similar to the same process that goes on in our own time. In this
particular case I will restrict myself to Friedman's observations on the
British and German experience, particularly at Jutland, even though his book
includes coverage on the fast growing U. S. Navy and seven other nations.

Rather than the technical minutiae of naval
guns and the underwater weapons mines, torpedoes, and ASW, I found the impact
of these weapon systems upon tactics and strategy the most interesting aspect
of Friedman's intense research. For instance, the fast developing long-range
torpedo had a significant effect on the thinking of both British and German
naval theoreticians. The 1914 British adage was that "gunnery fills a ship with
air but torpedoes fill it with water." The Royal Navy's tactical response to
this observation was to increase the range and rate of fire of their gunnery in
order to disable an enemy vessel followed by the coup-de-grace of a torpedo attack.

However, to increase rates of fire of the
battleship's main armament certain safety precautions were shuffled aside, such
as keeping the flash doors open rather than having them safely closed. Consequently,
while many commentators like to point out that the deck armor of the destroyed
battlecruisers Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible was too thin, in actuality their loss had much
more to do with the "tactical factor" of ammunition handling to speed the rate
of fire rather than the thickness of their deck amour. The battlecruiser as a
class likely could never have been built if deck plating was made thick enough
to protect against excellent German AP shells.

German ammunition
handling procedures were safer albeit slower in that flash doors remained
closed and ammunition was stored in brass cases rather than vulnerable silk
bags. This tempered their rate of fire but also considerably lessened the risk
of a catastrophic explosion. Consequently, the hard school of battle forced the
British to successfully re-think their ammunition handling techniques. It also
schooled them on developing improved fire-control procedures to overcome German
maneuvering designed to disrupt fire-control solutions.

The British had
studied and liked the idea of a massed torpedo attack at the culmination point
of a battle and without further evidence assumed the German's did also. While
the Germans might like to have made massed torpedo attacks, they didn't. German
doctrine considered torpedoes as far too expensive and valuable to be
squandered in such a fashion. The famous turn away of the German High Seas
Fleet at Jutland screened by only a few torpedoes was far from being the massed
attack that Admiral Jellicoe, the British Grand Fleet commander, anticipated.

One of the most
surprising revelations Friedman makes concerns the fact that while it was
standard Royal Navy practice to maintain a fleet plot during an engagement, it
was not German practice. According to Friedman what happened at Jutland "was
that the German commander von Scheer, discovered to his surprise that he had no
idea whatever of what was happening -- he maintained no plot and the situation
was far too complicated for anything less. In that sense he was profoundly
defeated and the only important conclusion he drew was that he never wanted to
fight the British fleet again". Von Sheer's self-induced confusion was largely
responsible for allowing Jellicoe to place his fleet across the Germans not
once but three times. Additionally, it seems the primitiveness of the German
tactical doctrine was largely responsible for the failure of von Scheer's
initial scouting plan. The botched job of scouting led directly to von Scheer's
surprise and confusion.

Freidman also
discusses the use of modern mines that were a highly potent weapon. Tactically
laid minefields inhibited the maneuvering of both fleets in the North Sea and
had probably more direct implications on immediate naval operations than any
other single factor other than the submarine. The mine was the ultimate
passive-aggressive weapon, the cost-benefit of which was highly efficient and
remains so to this day. He also reviews the primitive beginnings of ASW and
thoroughly discusses both its limitations and future promise to be fully
revealed in the Second World War.

Norm Friedman's book
is not a page-turner but if you have an interest in naval history and the
interplay of technology, tactics, and strategy, you might enjoy this new
addition to his library of naval literature. In my view, just the coverage of
the British and German experience at Jutland is worth the price of the book.

Jeff Williams spent his working life at IBM and Merrill Lynch,
but always sustained a deep curiosity about military and naval history. His
paramount interest has always been the Royal Navy of the Georgian era but his
fascination with the First World War has led him to extend that interest to the
naval campaigns of that conflict.